The Daily Parker

It wouldn't be a day ending in "y" without people looking at some stupid thing the OAFPOTUS said and asking "why?" Or, you know, lots of people:

• As the things the OAFPOTUS's defenders say get even more disconnected from observable reality, Occam's Razor shows us that the guy has no master plan; he's just insane.
• Of course, that suits the wannabe oligarchs who have surrounded him as he's allowing them to direct billions of your dollars and mine to their private interests.
• One of the top lawyers at the Internal Revenue Service warned that the unsigned letter from the Clown Prince of X purporting to fire 7,000 probationary employees contained material falsehoods designed to commit fraud upon the courts.
• The stupidest trade war in history has already started to affect New York City's tourism industry as Canadians—over a million of whom visited and spent over $600 million last year—are vacationing elsewhere.
• Jeff Maurer shakes his head at the number of Democrats confusing "fight" with "flail in a way that achieves catharsis and nothing else."
• The preliminary NTSB report on the near-miss at Chicago Midway Airport on February 25th suggested that sunlight disoriented the pilots of the business jet that incurred upon runway 31C, forcing a landing Southwest B737 to go around.

Finally, not that I complain about the weather enough already, but just look at the cold front that came through yesterday around 7:30pm:

I got caught outside wearing just a sweater and was quite unhappy. As in every March, we just want warmer weather already. Like, you know, yesterday afternoon.

Stuff to read:

• Forgetting (or just plain ignorant) that we have a Coast Guard better suited to the task of guarding our coasts, the OAFPOTUS has ordered the guided missile destroyer USS Gravely to the Texas-Mexico border.
• The OAFPOTUS and the Clown Prince of X, apparently not seeing the connection between weather forecasters and weather forecasts, have illegally fired 10% of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration staff just as a violent tornado outbreak killed 40 people in the Midwest and South.
• The administration's attacks on universities fit the Orban plan of creating a failed democracy, so naturally the OAFPOTUS has doubled down on them.
• Krugman points out that all of the above administration malfeasance has had a depressing effect on the US economy by reducing demand for our key exports, not least of which includes the $50 billion foreigners used to spend to get American educations. (He also has a good, long explanation of how inflation works, if you subscribe.)
• Surprising no one but still an illegally-targeted exercise of Federal power, the Federal Communications Commission has demanded to see the contracts between a number of National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting System stations and their acknowledged donors.
• The Waterbeach development outside Cambridge, England, has a new car-free housing complex—though it's still a 10 kilometer walk from the nearest railway station.
• Pilot Patrick Smith wishes the public would have a better sense of perspective about the safety of air travel, while acknowledging that it has seemed a bit rockier than usual.

Finally, thanks to reduced funding and deferred maintenance, the Chicago El has seen slow zones balloon from 13% of its tracks to 30% since 2019. Fully 70% of the Forest Park branch has reduced speed limits, making the trip from there to downtown take over an hour. But sure, let's  keep funding below the minimum needed to function, and keep the CTA, Metra, and Pace all separate so they can each fail in their own ways.

Who doesn't like the fun and adventure of spring weather in Chicago? I mean, you don't see temperature graphs like this coming from Los Angeles:

At 5:07 pm on Friday—only about 40 hours ago—it was 23.3°C, I had all my windows open, and I had a polo shirt on when I walked Cassie a few minutes later. Now it's 1.2°C, the temperature has dropped steadily since 3pm yesterday, and I'm about to put on a winter coat because it's bloody snowing.

This week we'll continue to whipsaw around the freezing mark, with forecast high temperatures of 11°C tomorrow and 18°C on Tuesday, followed by forecast lows of -1°C Wednesday night and 0°C on Thursday night.

Eventually we'll have consistently warm temperatures, and in fairness the snow isn't sticking. But March really knows how to torture us.

As forecast, O'Hare had an official high temperature of 26°C yesterday, the warmest temperature recorded there since 4pm on October 30th and the normal high temperature for June 10th. Inner Drive Technology WHQ got all the way up to 23.3°C just after 5pm, so we had all the windows open until the squall line blasted through after midnight.

Today we have a lot of wind and a lot of dust blown up from storms in Texas and Oklahoma. Without the dust, we'd have clear blue skies right now:

Remember what I wrote Thursday about how the air usually looked this time of year back in the 1980s? Today is just a little hazier. Well, OK, quite a bit hazier:

Even Cassie is wondering what that scent is:

That's the scent of climate change, baby. Same as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Fitting that we've got the resurrected zombie corpse of Herbert Hoover in the White House today.

It's 21°C at Inner Drive Technology WHQ and 22°C at O'Hare right now. In addition to being the normal high temperature for May 20th, that reading at O'Hare is the warmest since 11pm on October 30th. The forecast for O'Hare predicts a high near 26°C, which is normal for June 10th.

Which is all a long way of saying: I'm about to change into a polo shirt, take Cassie for a walk, and open every window in my house—not necessarily in that order.

By the way, the eclipse last night was really cool. I only wish I could have fallen back asleep more quickly after getting up to view it.

After our gorgeous weather Sunday and Monday, yesterday's cool-down disappointed me a bit. But we have clear-ish skies and lots of sun, which apparently will persist until Friday night. I'm also pleased to report that we will probably have a good view of tomorrow night's eclipse, which should be spectacular. I'll even plan to get up at 1:30 to see totality.

Elsewhere in the world, the OAFPOTUS continues to explore the outer limits of stupidity (or is it frontotemporal dementia?):

• No one has any idea what the OAFPOTUS's economic plan is, though Republicans seem loath to admit that's because he hasn't got one.
• Canada and the EU, our closest friends in the world since the 1940s, have gotten a bit angry with us lately. Can't think why.
• Paul Krugman frets that while he "always considered, say, Mitch McConnell a malign influence on America, while I described Paul Ryan as a flimflam man, I never questioned their sanity... But I don’t see how you can look at recent statements by Donald Trump and Elon Musk without concluding that both men have lost their grip on reality."
• On the same theme, Bret Stephens laments that "Democracy dies in dumbness."
• ProPublica describes a horrifying recording of Acting Social Security Commissioner Leland Dudek's meeting with senior SSA officials last week in which he demonstrated why the OAFPOTUS pulled him from a terminal job as "the ultimate faceless bureaucrat" to head the agency. (Some people have greatness thrust upon 'em?)
• Molly White sees "no public good" for a "strategic bitcoin reserve," but is too polite to call the idea a load of thieving horseshit.
• Author John Scalzi threads the needle on boycotting billionaires.
• Writing for StreetsBlog Chicago, Steven Vance argues that since the city has granted parking relief to almost every new development in the past few years, why not just get rid of parking minimums altogether?

Finally, in a recent interview with Monica Lewinsky, Molly Ringwald said that John Hughes got the idea for Pretty in Pink while out with her and her Sixteen Candles co-stars at Chicago's fabled Kingston Mines. Cool.

The temperature at Inner Drive Technology WHQ just hit 17.5°C, which it hasn't hit since 5:54pm on November 5th. That's almost 125 days, quite a while to go without wearing a jacket outside.

Unfortunately, spring weather isn't the only thing in the news today:

• Philip Bump asks, how low can the OAFPOTUS's approval rating actually go?
• Paul Krugman decries our current "government by QAnon."
• Radley Balko lays out three things Democrats can do right now.
• Ezra Klein uses the example of California's high-speed rail failure to argue for a politics of abundance, not scarcity.
• Malware infecting WordPress sites installs four back doors, all of which should be closed immediately.

Finally, Metra is seeking public input on a plan to rename the heavy-rail lines around Chicago. Right now, each line has an historic name and a different color. The favored proposal would be to give each line a letter signifying the direction from downtown, plus a number. For example, the Union Pacific North line that goes by my house would be renamed N1. And all the lines departing from a single downtown station would get the same color (green in the case of the three UP lines). I think this is a good proposal, and would bring Chicago in line with international cities like Berlin and Paris.

It's 13°C and sunny, so despite having added a couple of really useful features to Weather Now (still in the dev/test environment; sorry), I'm going to take Cassie on a 45-minute walk and then have a beer.

Yesterday was the 5th anniversary of the Brews & Choos Project's high-water mark before the pandemic. On 7 March 2020, I went farther than I'd ever gone before in search of breweries to add to the list, visiting Penrose and Stockholm's in Geneva, then More and Lunar in Villa Park on the way back. A few days later the world stopped for a while. It would be almost three months before I visited another brewery.

Yesterday, I took a half-day of PTO, braved some crappy early-spring weather, and met up with my Brews & Choos buddy at a relatively new place in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. We managed to visit five South Side breweries, and—here's the science part—consumed no more than 3 pints of beer over 5 hours. It was a marathon, not a sprint, after all.

In any event, I've got a lot of photos to go through and a lot of reviews to write, so look for them to come out over the next few days.

And hey, if you want to see more Brews & Choos reviews, contribute to The Daily Parker! Your $5 contribution keeps the site running for a day—or buys a tasing-size beer.

Another reason to contribute: I've started re-developing The Daily Parker's code from scratch. I changed direction slightly on an existing project to make it a blog on steroids, and I think it'll be super-cool when complete. So how about throwing in another $5 a month to support that, too?

I want to start with a speech on the floor of the French Senate three days ago, in which Claude Malhuret (LIRT-Allier) had this to say about the OAFPOTUS:

Washington has become the court of Nero, an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a jester high on ketamine in charge of purging the civil service.

This is a tragedy for the free world, but it is first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. Trump’s message is that there is no point in being his ally since he will not defend you, he will impose higher tariffs on you than on his enemies and will threaten to seize your territories while supporting the dictatorships that invade you.

I have faith in the strength of American democracy, and the country is already protesting. But in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in four years of his last presidency. We were at war with a dictator, now we are fighting a dictator backed by a traitor.

Malheureusement, il a bien raison. And his speech is worth reading (or hearing, si vous parlez français bien).

But that isn't all that happened in the last day or so. No, every day brings new revelations of stupidity and corruption in the new administration:

• James Fallows listened to the OAFPOTUS's address to Congress on Tuesday so you didn't have to, and found it...disturbing.
• The Clown Prince of X appears to have pressured the FAA into issuing a license for yesterday's launch of a SpaceX rocket that exploded just two weeks after another SpaceX rocket exploded. (You may call Musk a thuper-geniuth!)
• ProPublica does the math to demonstrate how the cuts the clowns have proposed at the Internal Revenue Service will actually cost more than they will save—forgetting for a moment that the point of those cuts is to make tax cheating less likely to get caught.
• Oh, and the clowns have illegally disbanded the committee that keeps your food safe from microbes.
• The Army Corps of Engineers admitted that the rushed release of water from Northern California reservoirs shortly after the OAFPOTUS took office simply wasted it, as everyone who can look at a map already guessed.
• The jobs report that the Bureau of Labor Statistics released today only encompassed data from the first three weeks of the administration, before they started illegally firing civil servants.

And now I will take a half-day of PTO and explore four new breweries in Bridgeport and Pilsen. If only the weather had cooperated.